


Fractured Hearts

by FirozTaverbi



Series: Extended Universe [5]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, h/c Ventus and Roxas are the same person, mainly just angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 18:38:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8589415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirozTaverbi/pseuds/FirozTaverbi
Summary: I'm not sure how much I like this but I'm bored of editing it so I'm going to upload it. Ventus and Vanitas while away the long years inside Sora's heart.





	

**_I._ **

Vanitas was gone and Ventus was alone.

Everything was hazy, like a dream. Time fragmented. Light nowhere and everywhere at once.

Ventus paced across the stained glass, his footsteps ricocheting into nowhere. His own likeness, sleeping in two dimensions. The other boy, his face so deceptively peaceful. Between them the Graveyard and crossed keys. Ventus gazed at the silhouetted blades for a moment, for eternity, the grief and anguish muted as if what had happened was somebody else's story.

He could feel the memory of a sea breeze caress his face.

**_II._ **

Ventus remembered Aqua and Terra. He cried to think they could be trapped in their own half-realities. He traced the lead between the panes, the delicate painted details, the slight crazing on the outer glass. Perhaps they were dead.

If so, Ventus wished he was dead too.

He remembered a silver-haired boy with piercing eyes and a sour face. He remembered the girl's noisy laughter, the smell of her sandy skin and her seasalty hair. He remembered sunsets and storms and whispered promises made in the hours before dawn. Not his promises.

He stared into the abyss below.

He said, his voice weak in the stillness, "Sora?"

But the boy had long forgotten the heart to which he had given refuge.

_**III.** _

Ventus lay on the glass. He gazed sightlessly at the inky darkness.

Slowly he allowed the memories of the Keyblade Graveyard to return to him.

He remembered Master Xehanort's nails in his neck. He remembered Vanitas.

He braved the darker half of the stained glass, as if to elucidate Vanitas' secrets from his sleeping image. Vanitas had said that they'd been the same person, before Master Xehanort separated them into light and dark. Did all that rage and pain belong to Ventus?

But Vanitas had created the Unversed. He had tried to kill Aqua. He shared Master Xehanort's desire to reignite the Keyblade War - to end the world as Ventus knew it. Ventus didn't want to hurt anybody. He just wanted to protect his friends. What could Vanitas know about that?

He stamped his foot down on the monster's face, cracking the glass.

**_IV._ **

Sometimes time seemed to carry him like a weightless fragment in a storm; sometimes he lay in a single moment, feeling the emotions of the boy who held him wash over him. Sometimes he thought he saw a flicker of movement on the glass, but by the time he called out Sora's name it was gone.

He waited. The boy grew older. His face became at once new and familiar. His limbs stretched out awkwardly. His thoughts began to linger more over the girl. He spent long afternoons in the classroom gazing out of the window, dreaming of other worlds.

One day - one moment, there were no nights or days in Ventus' endless timeless dream - he saw the outline of a figure pass before him, just for a moment. Not Sora. Ventus recognised the dark suit, the Keyblade held aloft, the masked face.

He pulled his own Keyblade into existence, daring Vanitas to reveal himself again, but time moved on before he saw anything cloud the stained glass's faint light again.

_**V.** _

Vanitas returned on the night that Sora's home was plunged into darkness. Ventus could feel the storm, his host's terror, the oppressive darkness closing in. Behind him Vanitas materialised, as if drawn out by the destruction around them.

Ventus responded to the attack before his mind registered it: Vanitas' Keyblade crashed against his, the force behind the blow forcing Ventus' knees to bend. He pushed Vanitas away, jumping back, putting distance between himself and the rage in the boy's eyes.

"You just don't know how to stay dead, do you?"

Vanitas' grip tightened around his Keyblade. He was breathing heavily, as if he'd been fighting for a long time. His posture slack, fatigued. When he looked up he smiled crookedly. He dropped his Keyblade. Spread his arms out wide.

"Kill me then. I know you want to."

Ventus remembered Aqua. He remembered Terra. He remembered the Unversed in every world and struck, again and again, fury clouding his vision. Yet his opponent only laughed.

He remembered Vanitas' taunts, his goading. Ventus forced himself to relinquish his Keyblade.

"You just want to form the Χ-Blade again."

Suddenly Vanitas was angry. His voice was hoarse, cracked, revealing a sickening desperation.

" _Do you think I ever cared about the Χ-Blade?_ "

**_VI._ **

"This is your fault!"

Ventus sat at the edge of the station, his feet hovering over an endless fall.

"Why didn't it _work_?"

If he closed his eyes he could feel the weight of Sora's Keyblade in his hands.

"I did everything he told me to!"

Sora's heart was so close he shared the boy's worry over his friends like déjà vu.

" _He promised me the pain would stop!_ "

Vanitas' boots smacked loudly against the glass. Ventus dared to glance at him. He was still pulling at his hair. He stomped over to the border of the stained glass and stared into the darkness.

"You're weak!" He yelled, although it wasn't clear whether he was referring to Ventus or himself. "You're _weak_ and you're _worthless_ and you should never have existed and I _hate you_!"

**_VII._ **

In this unreal, empty dimension, they had formed an uneasy truce. When they shared the station Ventus kept to his side and Vanitas kept to his. The other boy - was he a boy, or just a monster? - came and went, like clouds shuffling across the sky. They barely spoke. What was there to say?

Sometimes Vanitas paced restlessly. Sometimes he lay on his back, as still as a doll, gazing into the eternal darkness above them. Sometimes he leaned out over the edge, arms wrapped around his chest, and shook violently while Ventus pretended he couldn't hear him crying.

How many years had it been? Nine? Ten? Ventus felt the weight of time press down on him.

"Master Xehanort wanted me to form the Χ-Blade with you," he said once, his voice loud in the eerie silence. "But what about Terra and Aqua? What did he want with them? Couldn't he have just left them alone?"

To his surprise, Vanitas sat down just a few feet from him, hugging his knees to his chest like a caricature of a child.

"He needed a new body. He was going to take Terra's. Terra was weak."

"Terra wasn't weak-!"

"He was weak _just like you_!" Vanitas howled.

"Fine, fine. And Aqua?"

"She just needed to be eliminated. Master Xehanort knew she could never be corrupted."

"But _why_?"

"Who cares why?" Vanitas snapped. He punched the glass beside him, the motion repetitive, the panes splintering. "It doesn't matter now. Master Xehanort has his new body and he'll find another way to form the Χ-Blade without us. And I'm trapped here with _you_."

_**VIII.** _

Ventus sat with his eyes closed, trading one brand of darkness for another, letting the memories of his friends turn into tears on his cheeks. He imagined Aqua's hand on his shoulder, imagined her bending down to hug him from behind, her presence so comforting. He remembered how much he admired Terra, his tenacity and perseverance, the passion in his eyes, the strength of his arms and his heart. All gone, and if not... if not, they were getting older without him, while he remained trapped here in limbo. Their friendship becoming a memory.

He wanted to cry out, as if Sora could even hear him, beg him to find them, wherever they were, so he could see them - even though Sora's eyes - just one more time.

Sora was making new friends. He wielded the Keyblade like a natural, as if part of his heart had known that weapon for many years.

"Sora's just like you," said Vanitas, into the silence. "An idiot."

"The Keyblade chose him," Ventus replied. He engaged with Vanitas' idle conversation because it was the only thing that made time seem concrete, that made the swirl of half-experienced moments linear, comprehensible. Sora was searching for something. Someone. Someone important.

"That doesn't mean anything. The Keyblade chose _you_."

Ventus thought, but didn't say, "It chose you, too."

_**IX.** _

Vanitas said, his voice strangely calm, "If I close my eyes I can see him. The boy."

"Sora?"

"No, the other one."

The worlds were winking out. Simultaneously Ventus felt the ache of desperation and an empty, exhausted detachment. They were leaves on the wind of another person's life, watching the world dance and tumble without them, yet feeling nothing at all.

Riku was worlds away, in body and mind. Ventus missed him, but not as much as he missed Aqua and Terra. He felt nothing so much as that longing to be with his friends again, a loneliness that burned through all these timeless years.

"There's darkness in his heart," Vanitas continued. "Just like there was darkness in yours."

Ventus said nothing. There must have been so much darkness to have created Vanitas. Ventus tried to imagine it, all those ugly emotions, all that hatred. Had there been a Vanitas inside Terra's heart too? Was that what made him succumb to Xehanort?

Then, just when Ventus was beginning to think he was alone again: "The other boy is weak. The darkness is going to destroy him."

But the darkness didn't destroy him, even when his eyes melted into gold and his face became something familiar, something terrifying, something which made Ventus' fractured heart ache with grief and anger and fear.

_**X.** _

Vanitas reacted like a sudden burst of lightning, his Keyblade materialising before Ventus could even blink. He lunged forwards, emitting a scream, but the ghost had disappeared as rapidly as she materialised. They stared at the empty space.

"Who-?"

"The girl. The girl he loves." Ventus barely knew her, yet in an instant he had recognised her slim form and auburn hair. "Why is she here?"

But Vanitas didn't care. He receded to his side of the glass, sulking. Perhaps because he had been denied the pleasure of a kill; or perhaps he was afraid. If the girl could enter their limbo, perhaps someone else could.

Despite himself, Ventus shuddered. The featureless air suddenly felt cold, as if an atmosphere had descended where there was none before.

_**XI.** _

Kairi came and went like a gust of wind, disturbing the timeless almost-peace of Ventus' dream, but never staying long enough to speak. Sometimes Vanitas was there when she fluttered through; he attacked the space where she had been once more, then ignored her. Sometimes he spoke to Ventus, sometimes he spoke to himself, but mostly he had lapsed into silence, eyes closed as if asleep.

The darkness grew, and with it Ventus' fear. The monsters Sora fought with his new friends were not those he had faced in another lifetime, but they were familiar in the way their eyes glowed malevolently, in their jerky, inhuman movement, in their taste for destruction and hurt. They dragged out memories that Ventus could hardly bear to linger over, pulling him into a cage of grief and regret. If he had listened- if he had stayed- if he had just-

Mostly Vanitas spoke of his heart's glimpses of Riku, the spectre that was Xehanort a silent gulf between them. Ventus thought he sensed a sadism to Vanitas' fascination with Sora's friend, a sick pleasure at seeing someone suffer as he had suffered.

Ventus wondered if Vanitas had watched with the same morbid curiosity as Terra was corrupted, as Terra succumbed, as Terra was stolen from his friends and drowned in the darkness.

_**XII.** _

Vanitas lay on the stained glass, a mirror of his own fractured image, and smiled.

He said: "The darkness is consuming him."

The girl flickered into existence and was gone just as suddenly. In the motion of her body Ventus saw urgency, as if she was searching for something.

Vanitas said: "Why do you think you can reason with him?"

She was never still. Ventus realised that Kairi was trying to escape.

Vanitas said: "Give up, Sora. The friend you knew is gone. He's gone forever. He's one of us now."

The other boy became something else, the cloak of darkness covering his body agonisingly familiar. Vanitas laughed, the same peals of laughter that had erupted from his body after Ventus beat him to the ground. He laughed until his body shook and his eyes watered. The tears dripped down his face and splashed on the cracked glass. He curled into a ball with his head pressed against the panels holding his own image, fists clenched, sobbing and howling, unable to bear the sight of those evil golden eyes.

Ventus watched him, feeling strangely detached even has his cheeks burned with tears. He wondered what would happen if Sora's heart succumbed to the darkness. Would they die with him?

There was a part of Ventus that longed for the release.

_**XIII.** _

...And then, suddenly, he was pulled away, the station falling below him, falling, falling...

...He saw Kairi, just for a moment, just long enough for their eyes to meet...

...The years he had spent with his shadow becoming obscured, like a dream...

...His memories of Aqua and Terra slipping from his fingers...

...As if he were a stone slate being wiped clean of everything he had held dear...

He did not recognise the hooded man's golden eyes; all they elicited in him was a directionless sense of foreboding. He stared unseeingly at the stranger as he was given a new identity, only the faintest glimmer of having _forgotten_ something scratching the back of his mind.

Ventus was gone and Roxas was alone.


End file.
